bookworm and shark boy
by zxanthe
Summary: Seven days, seven stories. A collection of oneshots for SoMa week on Tumblr.
1. secrets

**A/N: **_day one, prompt "roommates." this one's rated M._

* * *

This is the way it goes:

To start, they take him to the white room and tie him in the strapped chair and then leave him. The brilliant light blinds him and makes his head ache something awful, so by the time the smooth-voiced man comes he's dizzy and nauseous and can hardly think straight. The smooth-voiced man asks him questions, thousands of them. He never knows the answers, though, and this makes the smooth-voiced man sigh and rub his temples. That sigh sends a jolt of panic through his gut, and he strains against the restraints that chafe at his wrists, his ankles, his forehead in a futile attempt to escape, because he knows what's coming (except he doesn't, not really, not at all).

Sometimes, they peel the skin from his finger until he's screaming and begging them to cut it off, to stop the pain. Other times cold black slimy nightmares are injected into his veins and he dreams of his brother slaughtered, of killing a child, of staring up at a cold pale sky as his ruptured, broken body destroys itself. They cut, they burn, and through it all they always demand answers to a thousand questions, in loud voices, in soft voices, in his brother's voice, in the soft sweet whisper of someone he used to know. But he doesn't know the answers, he never knows the answers, and so when it gets to be too much he'll lie, because maybe that way they'll stop.

Oh, he'll _lie_.

He cries about it after, in the silent darkness of his cell, because they don't like it when he lies. When he lies, they _know_, and they punish him for it.

"Tell us the truth," says the smooth-voiced man, "and we'll let you go."

IF ONLY HE KNEW WHAT _THE TRUTH _WAS!

/

It starts in her stomach, a subtle bubbling deep inside. She looks at the smooth-voiced man, his eyes hidden behind impenetrable black glasses, his fingers steepled in front of him.

"What's your name?" he asks, like he always does.

The feeling spreads through her nerve endings, makes her entire body tingle. She doesn't answer.

"Why are you here?" he asks, like he always does.

It rises uncontrollably up her esophagus and warms her throat, ignites her brain. First her breathing hitches, then her shoulders shake, and finally the smile blooms wide across her cheeks and breaks her face in two. The giggles are quiet, but they quickly rise in volume, until her hysterical cackles fill the room, until she falls out of her chair and reopens the cuts in her chest, until her entire body shudders and writhes and threatens to come apart at the seams because of the force of her mirth. She laughs and laughs and laughs, because _they cannot break her_. They've ripped her skin and left her alone and injected her with what feels like their entire arsenal of nasty chemicals and _she has not told them a single one of her secrets_. She knows she has Arachne and her sisters beat, because they can't kill her if they want the information that she has. And she knows, oh yes she _knows _they want it bad, but _they're not getting it_. Those filthy bitches will _never _pry her precious info from between her lips. Never ever _ever_.

And so she laughs, and the smooth-voiced man sighs.

When her collar pinches her neck and the world goes black, she knows she's won.

/

He's counting his fingers when he hears the sound of a door opening, of a body falling, of another set of lungs breathing. Apprehension twists like a knife in his gut. Surely this creature was sent to kill him, or to extract information from him that he _simply doesn't have_. He keeps his breathing even, though, and tries to keep calm, tries to sound like he's sleeping, because these things can smell fear.

Then they start giggling. It's a girl. He can tell by the sound.

(He wishes she would stop. Her laughter scares him more than sobs would. To drown her out, he concentrates on his hands.)

His right hand is a stump. It's achy and bloody and keeps him awake. His left is faring much better. Only the middle and pinky fingers are gone, and just the top part of the ring. What baffles him, though, is that he can _feel_ his missing appendages. They ache and itch and flex along with his other ones (his right hand most of all), but when he tries to grasp his missing hand and fingers his left meets with only empty air.

Still, the girl laughs.

Sometime later, she's stopped, and there's silence except for the sound of her breathing.

"Hello?" she calls, breathless, curious.

He doesn't answer.

"Hello?"

He's terrified of what could happen if he answers.

"I know you're there!"

He keeps his breathing even.

"Answer me!"

_In. And out. _His phantom fingers twitch.

"I probably shouldn't talk to you anyway," and she snorts. "You've probably been put here to get to me. Well, tell them that there's no fucking way it'llwork! No_ fucking way!_"

/

She crawls because she can't stand up without ripping open her wounds. So far, her cellmate hasn't said a word, and this puzzles her, because wouldn't he talk to her if he wanted to weaken her? In fact, he hasn't really done much but _sleep_, judging from the sound of his breathing.

The collision makes stars swim before her eyes, and she sits down hard. More cautious this time, her hand quests forward and encounters something hard and cold and smooth. "A barrier," she breathes, and she frowns, because why would they do that? Separating them means there's no possibility of the cellmate touching her or killing her or whatever it is that this plot is designed to do.

She raps her knuckles against the hard barrier. "Halooo!" she calls. "Are you there? Well of course you are, how could you not be? I was just thinking, you're gonna have a hell of a time trying to kill me from behind that thing!"

The breathing remains as steady and utterly indifferent as ever.

/

"Do you want to hear a story?" she asks him a long, long time later.

No, he doesn't. This is probably a ploy. More of their lies. The slight tremble in her voice is there to play on his sympathies, nothing more. He swallows. His mouth is dry.

(But in a starved, desperate corner of his mind, he actually does want to. Very much.)

"I'll tell you anyway."

_In. And out._

"There once was a man who was cursed by a witch, because he spurned her," she begins. "He could only come out at night, because if the sun were to hit him, it would cause his skin to melt and put him in terrible pain. More than anything, he wanted to be able to rejoin his fellows in the daylight, because he was lonely in his shadowy cave in the hills."

Keep it steady, keep it steady.

"So he armored himself, covering every inch of his skin in fabric, and went towards the villagers he listened to so often, thoughts of the father and brothers among them bolstering him on. But when the people saw him, they were frightened, because to them he was a monster, made menacing by all the layers of clothes he put on. This made the man very sad, and he realized that he could never belong in that beautiful sunlit world again. So he went back to his cave and stayed there for a very long time."

A stab of pain shoots through his missing hand. His breathing hitches.

"But as it happened, one of the villagers stumbled into his cave quite by accident, a girl. She was very frightened of the man at first, but she had a kind heart. Every day she would bring food up the hill, for which the man was very grateful. When he told her about the witch, the girl was very angry. She vowed to break his curse.

"So they journeyed, across deserts and oceans and forests, searching for her. But when they found her dwelling place, they discovered that the witch was long dead, killed by another hero. This sent them into despair, for how could the man be cured now?

"But in the back of her cave, there grew a flower. When the man sniffed it, he was freed from his curse. He and the girl married, and they lived happily ever after."

He blinks, and he realizes that he's back in the cold dark cell, where he's missing a hand and his body aches and there are no such things as happy endings.

/

When the cuffs around her wrists and ankles and neck grow ever so slightly warmer, she screams, because she's pissed off and scared and she doesn't want to lose any more toes and fingers. Panic crashes in her brain, drowning out all rational thought, but her body is frozen as the cuffs lift her into the air, taking her from the cell.

Later, as Cackle peels the skin from her finger, she admits one wrong, because she doesn't think she can take it anymore:

"I CHANGED IT! I CHANGED THE ENDING! THERE WAS NO FLOWER; THE MAN WAS NEVER CURED! INSTEAD HE STAYED THAT WAY FOREVER! I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY, I'M SO SO SORRY!"

/

She says her name is Maka Albarn. Her birthday is in April. She's nineteen. She likes books and baking and being in charge. She was also a Resistance spy.

She weaves entire worlds with her words, this girl. She changes the cold dark cell into a sunlit garden ringing with birdsong, or a fantastic undersea palace that's been abandoned for a thousand years, or her own home in the capital, peopled with friends who have names like Tsubaki and Blake and Stein. He finds out that Blake has a god complex and Stein is the smartest psychopath the world has ever seen and that she kind of has this crush on a golden-eyed guy everyone calls Kid. She talks of camping trips taken with Tsubaki and the annoying Blake, of books she's read, of the fact that she wants to be a lawyer. He learns all about how she got the nickname "Vomit Comet" from Blake (she got really, really drunk) and how her mama taught her to fire a laser pistol (despite the fact that owning a weapon like that was illegal).

He's drawn to her stories like a moth to a flame.

So when she returns one day from a session and the stories don't start up again, he's lost until he realizes something that makes his heart stop cold: _he's gotten attached to this girl._

And that absolutely _terrifies _him.

/

The cell is just a cell again now that she's quiet, growing ever darker and ever colder.

/

He just wants to hear her voice again.

(He can't take it anymore.)

/

There's a soft knocking sound on the barrier.

_It's just a dream_, she tells herself, because she's so tired but she's afraid of what waits for her in her dreams and it was probably the hallucination of a sleep-deprived mind anyway.

As if reading her thoughts, the knocking stops and silence falls.

There's the sound of a throat being cleared. Her eyes snap open, because the breaths, those maddening, steady, indifferent breaths have stopped at last and she'll finally be able hear the voice behind them.

"And then?"

A man's voice. Deep, raspy from disuse. "And then what?" she asks.

"You…you never said what happened to…to Hazel." His words are hesitant, disjointed, as if he's not quite sure how to speak anymore.

She has to think a moment, and she's surprised that he remembers. "That's it," she tells him. "That's where the book ended."

"Ah."

Silence stretches between them.

"What do you think happened?" he asks at last.

"Hmm…I like to think that she went on with her life. Met someone else. Was happy."

"That's cool."

She smiles, because she hasn't had a real conversation in quite a long while and it felt nice.

/

He tells her his name when she asks. He has to think, because it's been a while since he's needed one. But it comes to him, slowly, mercifully: "Soul Evans."

"That, my friend, is a really cool name."

He can't help but wonder if she's mocking him, because he had always gotten weird looks for his unusual moniker (eyes and teeth notwithstanding). But there is no hint of derision in her tone, so for once, he decides to take it as a compliment and tells her so.

/

She tries to get him to talk more about himself, but every time she broaches the subject he shuts down and they're reduced to sitting against the cold hard barrier in silence. She respects this silence now, because the first time it happened, she tried to push him for information. That made him move to the far corner of the cell, and worse, he didn't talk to her for a long time (which drove her crazy but she didn't want to admit it). So she learns about the enigma known as Soul Evans in bits and pieces. She finds out that he had a brother. That he was a soldier. That he was eighteen when they put him here but he has no idea how old he is now. That he's a music junkie. That he really likes to cook. It's still a pitiful amount of information, but it's all she has.

He doesn't seem to like her very much (or anything at all, really). He's quiet, insightful, and broken, in body and mind. The remnants of sarcasm salt his words. But if she's being honest with herself he's become the only thing keeping her frayed and broken mind from completely falling apart, because in her dreams the witches' questions crash loud and screaming into one another and she can feel her tormentor chew through her chest and rip out her warm beating heart with his teeth.

One day, when he returns broken and bleeding and missing two toes, he tells her in a choked voice that he used to play the piano.

/

"Ah," he says as the syringe enters his arm.

"Does it hurt?" asks the little girl.

Her papa licks his lips, leaving a black smear. "No."

"It looks like it does," Maka says, eyeing the large needle.

"It feels _great_," says her papa, and he smiles. But he's melting, she realizes to her sudden horror, slow and steady, like a candle, like chocolate, like cheese. His smile widens grotesquely before turning into a grimace, and she can see his ribs swimming in the dark oily muck beneath the ruins of his clothes. One blue eye falls from his face with a soft squelching noise. "_My blood is black!_" he gurgles, and from the glutinous ruins of his body a monster emerges, grotesquely skinny with shark's teeth and burning red eyes.

"I love you, Maka," it says in Soul's voice, and to her utter horror she finds she cannot scream.

/

After that, she finds her papa pouring from her lips and into Soul's lap.

"He sounds like a douchebag," her cellmate says matter-of-factly.

"He is."

They're sitting cross-legged, face-to-face (or at least she thinks they are), the barrier rearing up invisibly between them. She's on the verge about telling him about the hallucination too, but then she remembers that he probably doesn't want to hear a horror story like that (after all, he has enough nightmares of his own).

/

"Tell me about the sun."

"Well…um…it's really bright…"

"You're usually so eloquent," he says dryly.

"Not now."

He sighs. "It's a big yellow ball in the sky, right?"

"Yeah. You left out warm."

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. "I can't remember the sun," he tells her.

She takes a deep breath.

"The sun is bright and hot," she begins. "Sometimes it's yellow and sometimes it's red and sometimes it's…it's every color in between. I used to go swimming on the roof of my apartment tower at six o'clock and the setting sun would turn the whole city into glittering gold and copper. The skycars would be like sparks, dancing up from a campfire. It was cold all the way up there, but during the summer I liked to try and get a tan anyway, because the warmth felt so nice."

"Did you?"

"Did I what?"

"Get a tan."

"No. Too pale."

He exhales sharply, almost like a laugh. Impulsively, she reaches towards him, but her broken fingers slam into the barrier.

"The hell was that?" he asks as she clutches her hand, whimpering and swearing under her breath.

"I just wanted to see your smile."

/

Over and over, she slams into the barrier, until she's broken and bleeding and sobbing uncontrollably because it hurts and she's starving and she _needs _to touch his skin. She's going to go insane, she's going to _die_ if she doesn't touch him, if she doesn't feel his living warmth, the proof that he is real.

_This is how they'll break you_, a part of her mind whispers. And in that instant she hates herself for falling into their trap, because she knew, oh, this whole time she _knew_.

"Maka, Maka, Maka," he says, and she hears the dull thuds of his fists against that _fuckinggoddamn barrier._

"Soul!" she half-shrieks, half-moans, and that's when he tells her a story, a story about a soldier who couldn't be controlled.

/

"I love you," she tells him one day or night or year, and he wants to say _I don't _or _I'm sorry _or another such rejection, but he can't deny the warm, flickering thing that has kindled to life in his chest. "I love you," she repeats. "I love you I love you I love you, Soul Evans. I love you so much."

"Maka," he croaks, and presses his remaining hand to the barrier. He can hear the sob in her voice, feel her tears wetting his cheeks, because he knows and she knows that those words have doomed them both.

/

"Now," says the smooth-voiced man, his fingers steepled in front of him like they always are, "what is your name?"

The girl swallows. On the table, the boy shudders involuntarily.

"M-Maka," she blurts out.

The smooth-voiced man looks at her.

"M-Maka Albarn."

"And why are you here?"

She swallows. She can't let the bitches have her secrets.

Someone Maka doesn't know comes forward, his foot scuffing softly on the floor. She sees the glint of a needle in his hand.

_She can't let the bitches have her secrets._

The needle plunges into Soul's neck, and his eyes snap open, this startling crimson color, made even more so by the thin covering of white hair on his scalp.

He moans, and Maka flinches.

She keeps her lips pressed together, even as the moans grow to screams, even as he stares wide-eyed at whatever horror he's being forced to see. Tears course down her cheeks, hot and thick, and she can't see, only hear him, and that somehow makes it so much worse.

"I'm a traitor!" she chokes out because _she can't take it anymore_, and then, mercifully, the screaming stops.

"Why?"

She sucks in a ragged breath. "Because…"

_The bitches can't have her secrets._

They give him something different this time, something that the smooth-voiced man tells her is _pure liquid fear_.

His shrieks are something out of a nightmare, something dragged up from the deepest parts of a being, the parts that should never, ever be touched. They pierce straight through her armor to cut her heart with its every beat.

To hell with her secrets.

/x/

When she wakes it's to sunlight and fresh air and birdsong, and she's bewildered by all these things because they simply cannot be real. So she sits up (or tries to, but her entire body is one solid mass of ache and pain), and surveys her surroundings.

A small room, bright and airy. Worn wooden floorboards, whitewashed walls, unadorned except for a rug and a nightstand with a vase of flowers atop it. There are windows too, two of them, and they're open, letting in a warm sweet breeze.

_What a nice dream they've given me_, she thinks, but then she remembers bright globes of light, Blake's voice, and the word _soul_.

She can't stop crying, because she's a traitor and he's dead.

/

"It's okay," Tsubaki says. "You didn't give them anything important."

"But-"

"They didn't tell you any more than you needed to know, Maka. You didn't jeopardize _anything_, I promise."

Tsubaki's soft voice washes over her, but it doesn't soothe the ache in her chest. All Maka can do is sob and cling to her friend and marvel at how easily she was broken.

"You want to go see Soul?" Tsubaki asks gently, when Maka's calmed down some.

With a hiccup, she pulls away, stunned. "But they killed him," is all she can think to say, and through red-rimmed eyes Tsubaki smiles.

/

When he wakes, there's a shape at the end of his bed. His first instinct is to flinch away, but his body is heavy and slow and his vision's clearing anyway.

Her hair is longer. That's the first thing he notices. It's ashy blonde and dull and kind of greasy, but it gives her gaunt face a much softer look (or maybe her face itself is softer; it's hard to tell). Her green eyes are huge as ever, though, and they gaze at him hungrily, sparkling with tears.

"You were dead," she says, and then she takes what remains of his left hand in both of hers.

"I'll bet," he groans, because his mouth is dry and his stump is aching and he can feel the beginnings of a headache at the edges of his mind.

Her fingers trace his remaining hand and they sit in silence.

"Where am I?" Soul asks after a while.

"A safe house, somewhere."

He takes a deep breath. The air smells like wildflowers and growing things.

"They're going to get you a new hand, you know," she says, reaching under the blankets and squeezing his right arm.

The breath catches in his throat. His eyes meet hers.

She smiles. "I can't wait to hear you play."


	2. flying lessons

_day two, prompt "nosebleed." rated T._

* * *

When in weapon form, Soul would describe his sense of touch as comparable to wearing gloves. So when they arrived for their first flying lesson and suddenly Maka was straddling his shaft, it wasn't so much the exact _texture _of her legs (and what lay between), than the _pressure_ of them, all around him, rubbing against him. Soul had to work very, very hard to stay cool and not fuck it all up, but even so, a thin trickle of blood still made its slow way out his nose, because _damn_, he hadn't quite expected this.


	3. tethers

**A/N: **_day three, prompt "insanity." rated T._

* * *

the moon whispers sweet secrets in his ear and his blood is singing with their dark, luscious taste. a discordant melody crashes through his veins, rebounds against bones and skin, fills him to overflowing and threatens to tear him apart, but instead of screaming he laughs because he's never felt more alive in his sixteen years of life, not like this, not like this.

_Although they'd warned him it would be like this, and they'd told him he should keep control_

but the night air is so fragrant, so lovely, it beckons him with a smile

_And he'd nodded and swore up and down that he would, even though they all knew he was making a promise that he could never keep_

the moonlight crawls across his skin, caresses it like a lover would

_If he succumbs to the Blood he's a failure as a Hunter, a failure as a partner, a failure as a friend. He must master this, for her sake if not his_

green eyes find his in the dark filled with shadows

_He'd heard them whispering that he couldn't do it, that nobody could do it_

"Soul," croaks the girl, "you can do it."

_heard her scream "NO" and he knew why_

the moon murmurs in his ear and his body is tingling and he's going to break apart but somehow he pushes all this away and stares into the eyes of his partner and somewhere in the ruin of his brain he finds her name, "Maka."

he's shaking but he stands and grabs her hand, grabs it tight, and she's grinning and her eyes are filled with moonlight

"knew you could," she says or he thinks that's what she said but does it really matter anyway? he can't tell, because the world is spinning, spinning, spinning, and all that he can hear are green eyes and the gleam of moonlight off her shiny white teeth.


	4. girl and ghost

**A/N: **_day four, prompt "loyalty." rated T. publishing this one a little early because i'll be super busy on Thursday!_

* * *

At first, the glowing irritated him, but when he realized no one else could see it, he got over it. In fact, he began to rely on his newfound luminescence to guide him in the dark (since night vision didn't come with being dead, unfortunately). Sometimes, when he had nothing better to do, he would lie on his back at the bottom of rivers and streams and swimming pools at night and admire the way the water shimmered in his pale light.

That night, a particularly ferocious storm had blown in, howling its rage to the universe. The river was raging, turbulent, choked with muck and dead plants and a thousand other debris. He was lying on his back in the midst of this, completely unperturbed as a maelstrom churned around him, through him. He had been watching the play of light against the swirling patterns of sand and wayward fish and river when he was rudely interrupted by a car, settling quite neatly on top of him.

It's not like it hurt him or anything. Things like that happened all the time, when he wasn't paying attention. With a sigh he sat up, head emerging from the floor of the vehicle.

The little girl's hair floated about her in a cloud almost lazily, one pigtail undone, blood curling from a hidden wound. She was still strapped into her booster seat in the back, her head lolling limply to one side. No bubbles rose from her mouth, no wide panicked eyes, no frantic flailing of limbs.

_Ah, shit,_ he thought, and the familiar feelings of bitterness and frustration welled in him because there was _nothing _he could do or could've done that would have made a difference.

He reached to smooth her hair (as if that would make it any easier), and the moment his translucent glowing finger touched her scalp

he could feel the river, cold and wet, slicing through him, _pulling _him

he couldn't breathe, but more importantly, he _needed _to

he could feel this _thrumming_ throughout his body, a hum of energy as he hadn't felt in decades

and when he looked at the little girl her eyes were open and pointed right at him, almost as if she could

see him.

* * *

"Such a vivid imagination," said Kami, sipping a glass of iced lemonade and leaning against the doorframe. Spirit smiled. "She got it from me."

They watched their daughter play in silence. Her happy shouts and shrieks drifted through the warm late-afternoon air.

"I wonder why she calls him Soul," Kami mused. "Kind of a weird name for an imaginary friend, don't you think?"

Spirit shrugged. "I dunno. Stein had a cousin whose imaginary friend was named Zinnia or something like that…"

"…and they're probably both in a mental institution, knowing our dear professor."

Spirit chuckled, but it petered out quickly and dissolved into a small frown as he watched his daughter, talking excitedly to empty air.

* * *

He'd forgotten, somewhere in those decades drifting around, exactly how _annoying _children could be.

"And then," continues the six-year-old, "BOOM! He rose up out of the water and-"

"Saved the day, yeah, yeah, yeah," Soul says, and Maka glares. "It's mean to interrupt people while they're talking!"

"Well, I don't give a f..I don't care!"

"Hmph!" she says, and turns on her heel and marches away.

"I don't think you should bring me to school anymore," Soul tells her tiredly when she comes back a few seconds later. "People are giving you weird looks." Particularly a dark-haired boy with a big yellow star sewn on his shirt. Soul eyes him. He doesn't like the look on that little shit's face.

Maka looks at him with a frown on her face. "But the teachers think it's okay."

He sighs. He's tried explaining this to her over the past two years, but it's never really sunk in. "Only you can see me, Maka."

"So?"

"So, that means the teachers can't see me. Your parents can't see me. Your little classmates can't see a f…a shadow or anything."

Maka frowns, sucking on her index finger.

"It makes sense," she says finally, and Soul exhales. _Thank God._

"But…could you still come with me?" She turns those big green eyes on him, pleading. "I won't talk to you or anything!"

"Makaaa," he whines, falling on his back. "I already went to kindergarten _once_…"

She gets that stubborn set to her jaw he knows so well, and he sighs, because he knows there's no dissuading her. "Fine."

She beams. "You're the best, Soul!"

* * *

"_Well, you know what? FUCK YOU!_" screams Kami Albarn, and Maka flinches as if she's the one who's getting yelled at. She hugs the pillow tighter to her chest, body shuddering with choked sobs.

He doesn't tell her that it's going to be all right or that it's just a little spat or some other bullshit like that. He just sits with her and holds her close, even though he can't really feel her skin and his arm is kind of sunk into her shoulders. Downstairs, he hears the sound of a door slamming, and then, at last, the house is silent.

The twelve-year-old looks at him. "I really wish I could hug you," she whispers.

He sighs, but later, when she's curled up under the blankets, her breathing even, he whispers back, "Me too."

* * *

"How did you die?" she asks him. It's summer, and they're at the pool and she's got watermelon juice all over her face. Soul pretends he didn't hear the question. "The little shit looks like he's planning something," he says, jerking his chin towards a violently blue-haired boy shooting glances in Maka's direction.

"Quit calling Blake a little shit," she says crossly. "But don't change the subject. I think it's about time you told me."

"You're too young."

"I'm fifteen!"

Soul fidgets. "Look, pigtails, can't we talk about this some other time? It's a beautiful day."

"That's what you always say."

"Let's just say that I was a stupid kid who hated his parents." He'll throw her a bone, because it's nice out.

"That's not an answer."

"Whaddaya want then, a fucking biography?"

"I really want to hit you right now."

"Go ahead and try," he says, grinning lazily.

"Sometimes I wonder why I talk to you, Soul," she grouses, glaring at the pool water.

"Sometimes I wonder why you have such tiny tits."

Her fist comes flying out of nowhere, sinking into his shoulder. "Nice try," he says. "Bastard," she mumbles, her face flushed with anger.

After a while, though, when she's cooled down a little, she turns to him. "At least tell me _when _you died."

"At the ass-crack of dawn," he says sarcastically.

"I meant the _year_, stupid."

He glances at her. She's not looking at him, just dipping her toe in the water and tracing circles.

"1975," he says, because she deserves to know that he's not seventeen at all.

"I figured," she says. "What with your clothes and all."

"What's wrong with my clothes?"

"They're just so…_old_. I mean, bell-bottoms? Seriously?"

"Shut the fuck up, Maka! These clothes were the _shit_ back then!"

"It's 2007," she says with a giggle. "And bell-bottoms are most definitely not the shit to wear."

He doesn't get a chance to reply, though, because suddenly she's flying into the pool and the little shit is standing in her place, cackling maniacally. "Blake, you _asshole_!" Maka shouts when she surfaces, coughing and spluttering. "I'll kill you for this!"

Blake snorts. "Go ahead and try. I'll kick your ass."

"Maybe you're right," Maka mutters to him as she hoists herself from the water. "That guy _is _a little shit."

Soul is too busy laughing.

* * *

"No, you stupid! It's because I love you, that's why!"

The words hang in the air between them. Suddenly, Soul feels as though a hand is squeezing his throat, cutting off his ability to speak. Maka's eyes have gone wide and her face is slowly but surely turning a splotchy red as she realizes what she said.

"You can't," says Soul softly, his brows knitting together. "Goddammit, Maka, you can't fall in love with me!"

"And why not?!" Her rage has rekindled, and she walks right up to him and puts her face close to his. "What's so wrong with me loving you?"

He grits his teeth and backs away, putting a hand to his face. How can she be so blind?! Must he really spell it out?

"I'm dead, that's why! Been that way for thirty-five years! There's no fucking way it could work!"

Her lips quivers. "What if I don't care?!"

"What if I do!"

They stand in silence, breathing ragged. Soul is shaking.

"What if I do?" he repeats, and then he comes forward and tries to push a loose strand of hair behind her ear, except that his finger goes right through it, like it always does. He clenches his fists at his sides, because beneath the anger there's this deep, ache, an ever-expanding pit inside him. "You see now, Maka?" he says bleakly.

He can see the gears turning behind those bottomless green eyes, see the anguish, the anger, the familiar stubborn glint. "It doesn't matter," she mumbles at last, even though they both know it does, this unbridgeable chasm of an issue.

"I don't want to watch you die," he chokes out, and for a long time they stare at each other until Maka comes forward and puts her arms around him, awkwardly, because she can't feel anything but air in the space where he's standing.

"We're such idiots," Maka mumbles, and then he draws back and puts his lips on hers (except he's not sure if he did, because his eyes are closed and he can't feel a goddamn thing). He opens his eyes to see that Maka has pulled away and stiffened.

_Shit._ "Maka, I-"

"That night."

"What?"

Her hands lift to his shoulders, eyes wide, wild with excitement. "That night you saved me from the wreck. How did you do it?!"

"I…I don't know." And he doesn't, not really. "All I did was…touch you."

Maka's eyes grow wider, if that's possible. "Have you ever heard of a plane?"

"I took geometry, if that's what you're-"

"No, no, no!" she says, shaking her head vigorously. "Not _that _kind of plane! I mean like another plane of existence! Soul, what if you're just in another plane or dimension or whatever that just happens to overlap with this one?! God, I can't believe I didn't realize this before! It makes so much sense!"

For a few moments, they stand in silence.

"You're crazy, you know that?" Soul says.

"I'm not! What if, on that night, I was so close to death, so close to being able to transcend dimensional boundaries, that somehow I was able to drag you back to this one, if only for a moment? Maybe that's how you got me out of the car, because suddenly I wasn't really _part _of this plane anymore, except that I was! Soul, was there a body?"

"What?"

"Whenever you died, did they find your body?"

"No," he says, and his eyes widen.

"That's it! That's how you got here, then! Somehow at the moment of your death something…went wrong, you could say, and then somehow your _body _crossed over with you into the next plane and that's why you weren't able to go on, because you're not really _dead_!"

Her words echo over and over in his head, and he looks at her. Such a nice story, such a perfect solution to their problem...it simply can't be real.

_But_, whispers a voice in his head, _what if it's true? What will you do then?_

He doesn't know. He doesn't know.

* * *

It was all over the news. Soul Evans, son of renowned musicians Wesley and Diana Evans, had died in a freak automobile accident one night in May of 1975. The police had found the twisted remains of his car at the base of a ravine just outside the city where the Evanses made their home, but one thing didn't add up: the driver's seat was coated in blood, but there was no body. That little fact was kept covered up, of course. There was a quiet little funeral and a quiet little grave, and nothing more was said about the matter.

Being dead, Soul had thought, was definitely an improvement. Suddenly he was free of them, free of their expectations and his own inferiority. He'd reveled in his invisibility, flew as fast as he could away from them and his old life. For almost forty years he drifted, until the night Maka's car landed on him at the bottom of the river and suddenly, he wasn't alone anymore.

It wasn't like he hadn't thought about the nature of his existence before today. He'd been by turns frustrated, angered, and depressed concerning his condition, and he'd come to the conclusion that he was trapped forever here, doomed to linger until the end of time (and probably after that, too). Until he met Maka, he'd been resigned to his fate, but somehow that stupid angry violent girl had made him want to live again.

At first, he stayed with her because he was desperate to somehow make a _difference_ in someone's life, but as he watched her grow somehow something changed and he realized that he would never, _could _never, leave her.

* * *

His eyes have closed and he fancies he can feel a little spot of heat in the center of his chest.

"Maybe," said Maka, "I can bring you back, since we've touched."

"Ready?" she whispers now, and he nods.

They've tried this a thousand times since they've arrived at college, but this time, when her hand plunges into his torso, it feels icy-cold. He gasps, and Maka jerks him forward, pulls him and pulls him and pulls him until he moans the word _stop_, because it feels like he's being stretched and melted and burned. Pins and needles sweep across his body, so strong he thinks he might black out, and then Maka lets out a scream and the world goes dark.

* * *

"You should major in physics," Soul tells her. Maka shakes her head. "Nah. It'd take all the fun out of fiction."

He snorts. "I thought you didn't like those kinds of books."

"Not true! You just don't pay attention."

"I just don't care."

Soul gasps when her fist hits his shoulder, all sharp knuckles and angry force. "That hurt, pigtails," he mumbles.

"I'm glad," she says, and she grabs the collar of his shirt and kisses him, long and deep.

This time, Soul can feel every goddamn thing, and he likes it.


	5. gegenschein

**A/N: **_this particular chapter is based off of a lovely book called "The Returned" by Jason Mott. you should really go read it. there's also a television series called "Ressurection" that's loosely based on said novel. anyway, this one's for day five, prompt "wounds," and is rated M._

* * *

He can't speak.

When he first heard about it on the news, he didn't know what to think. The mere _fact _that people were returning from the dead was impossible in and of itself, but the proof was right there, in the riots outside the first man's house, in the constant chatter filling up the airwaves. Still, he checked the calendar, just to be sure that April Fool's Day hadn't come early and it wasn't all some elaborate hoax. He was hesitant to believe. Were these people, these Returned, the same as the originals, the people who left this Earth so long ago? He resolved to ask Kid about it, just as reporters around the world resolved to ask the young Lord Death the very same question. For now, though, he kept his distance and decided to go about his life as if something hadn't shifted irrevocably in the makeup of the world.

But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't quench the spark in his heart. The spark of hope. The spark of dread.

It's nighttime in Death City, but the streetlights glow bright, and in the dim orange radiance filtering through the window at the end of the hall, he can see her. Her silhouette is so achingly familiar: slender, pigtails, the ruffles of a skirt.

"Hi, Soul," says Maka's voice softly. She reaches, takes his tan hand in her pale one.

He can see the glimmer of her wedding ring, right there on her finger. Her hand is warm against his, solid, real.

He can't breathe.

What could prepare him for this? It's like he's fallen from some high place and hit the ground hard, all breath gone. His meister, his wife, the light and the love of his life, standing right there on his doorstep as if she hasn't been dead five long years and nothing has changed at all.

"Come on in," he says, because he doesn't know what else to say.

-x-

She was driving home, alone, at night, and there was nothing he could have done. When he was woken at midnight by a phone call from Kid himself, Soul didn't believe him at first. He couldn't. It was simply impossible that Maka, his resilient, courageous Maka, survivor of so very many high-risk missions and a beloved DWMA alumnus, had died in a mere _car accident_.

At the funeral, the casket was closed.

That was the night he nearly lost his mind, because his heart was torn asunder and nothing could dull the pain, the loss, the sense of failure and impotence, no matter how much he drank. When the black blood bubbled up in him, a rising tide of insanity, he thought about riding the wave, drowning in it, letting it pull him under once and for all, because then, maybe then, he could pretend that she was still with him, still alive with beating heart and breath in her lungs.

It was Anna, however, who saved him.

His daughter. His and Maka's beautiful daughter, with her mama's eyes and her papa's sharp teeth and white-gold hair, all of four years old. She'd padded to the living room at five in the morning and crawled up into his lap, burrowing her face in his torso and clutching him tightly to her.

"You smell funny, Daddy," she'd mumbled into his shirt, and something in the drunken haze of his mind clicked and he looked down at his daughter with new eyes because he couldn't simply dissolve himself in drink and insanity, because she _needed _him. He could just hear Maka's reaction to his foolishness: _Stupid idiot! You're just going to leave Anna all alone, then! Are you going to be as bad a papa to her as mine was to me?! _And he'd felt the Maka-chop, so hard to the top of his head it had made him see stars. No way in hell could he be on the same level as Spirit Albarn. The idea sent him reeling.

He shook his head. "S'alright, 'Na," he told her quietly, smoothing down her hair, kissing the top of her head. He didn't trust himself to be able to carry her, so with his head spinning and his vision blurry, he led her down the hall to her room. He'd tucked her in and turned on her night-light for good measure and when he turned around she was watching him with her mother's luminous green eyes.

"Love you, Daddy," she'd told him.

"Love you too," he'd said softly, before turning out the light and shutting her door behind him.

-x-

"I woke up in Japan, actually," Maka says.

_Woke up_. Soul frowns at her choice of words.

"Tsubaki found me."

This brings him up short. "And she didn't call me?"

"She wanted to," says Maka. "But I thought I'd surprise you."

Soul can't find his words.

"She was crying," she continues softly.

There's so much he wants to tell her, but he's not sure if he can.

"You've grown a beard," Maka murmurs with a frown. She comes closer and puts her hand on his cheek, rubs the short stubble there. Her skin rasps softly on the coarse hairs.

His hands are shaking. In the cold, empty darkness, he can feel her soul, brushing softly up against his, like it used to every day of their lives, familiar and warm and comforting. Suddenly there's a lump in Soul's throat, but he keeps his breathing even.

"What's wrong?" she asks. She knows him too well, can read the nuances of his face easily, like the books she so loved.

He missed this so much. So fucking much.

_But you're dead_, he thinks as he gathers her in his arms, breathes in the strawberry scent of her hair, feels her soft, pale skin, her living warmth, the beat of her heart and the breath in her lungs, gloriously, wonderfully alive. She's still twenty-nine, still young, still beautiful, still the same, and abruptly he realizes that now he's thirty-five and he has a beard and he's not the same Soul he was before.

-x-

She gets ready for bed in the usual manner, which he'd forgotten somewhere in those five years she was gone. A small voice in the back of his mind lets him know it's not cool to stare, but he does it anyway.

-x-

"M-Mom?"

It's morning. Anna's hair is ruffled from sleep. Maka looks up and her fork clatters onto her plate of scrambled eggs as she beholds her daughter, now nine years old, skinny as a twig with a waterfall of hair to her waist.

"Anna," she says.

His daughter's eyes dart to his face. Soul smiles from his place at the stove.

Like she can't quite believe what she's seeing, Anna walks slowly towards her mother, into her waiting arms. And then they're both gripping each other tightly, and Anna's laughing and crying all at once and Maka's peppering her with kisses and tickling her and Soul stares at his wife and daughter until he smells something burning. With a yelp, he yanks the blackened mass of what was supposed to be a pancake from the burner.

-x-

They all come. Black*Star and Tsubaki and their two children, Kid and Liz and Patty and even Blair. Black*Star runs to Maka and scoops her in his arms, hugging her tightly and twirling her. In his elation Black*Star's feet leave the ground and they smash into the ceiling, leaving a sizable dent. Fortunately, Black*Star took the brunt of the blow, but even so, Soul gives his best friend a healthy piece of his mind. Anna can't stop laughing at his antics.

"Why?" Soul asks Kid later, in the privacy of the kitchen. The Shinigami sighs. "I don't know."

"You're the god of death," Soul says dryly.

Kid shoots him a look. "I'm well aware of that fact."

"So then why can't you answer my question?"

He only shrugs helplessly. "It's complicated."

They leave it at that.

The rest of the night is a happy, tear-stained blur. Nobody can keep their hands off his wife for long, as if checking to make sure she's real. Late into the night they talk, over glasses of wine and memories. Black*Star sincerely apologizes for the time he called Maka's hobby of gardening stupid. Patty can't stop chattering about the fact that her big sis is getting married. Soul watches proudly as Anna transforms (she's built like her grandpa, but has his blade in green and black), just as he taught her. With deft, expert hands, Maka wields their daughter, right there in the living room to oohs and ahhs and laughter, and the sight makes something in Soul happy and sad all at once.

-x-

She looks like Maka, talks like Maka, and her soul feels like Maka's, but there's something off about her. When she found the half-empty pack of cigarettes on the balcony, he'd had a mini panic attack, cursing himself for not putting them up sooner and trying quickly to think of a believable excuse as to why they were there in the first place. But she didn't throw them away, or snarl about irresponsible habits, or even whack him in the head with a book, as she was so fond of doing. She only frowned in puzzlement and considered the package before silently setting it back down again.

Not even an angry look. He'd found that decidedly strange, and when she looked up at him and met his gaze she'd only frowned and said, "What?"

He hadn't been able to come up with a reply.

And later that night, when they were all three snuggled up on the couch watching a movie, he watched her. Her eyes were half-closed and stared unblinkingly at nothing, and when he reached out for her soul it was faint and light and barely there. In a moment of panic he reached over Anna and squeezed Maka's shoulder. She didn't move, but when he gently shook her she blinked and smiled as if nothing was wrong, and it was then that Soul knew that this person wasn't truly his Maka, because there was no fire in her.

-x-

They lay naked in bed together. Maka's finger trails lightly across Soul's chest. "You're different," she says, and he is. He's thirty-five now, still slender and toned, but older, not the thirty-year-old that she remembers.

"I like it," Maka whispers, and she kisses him and pushes her body against him, her nipples two hard points, and he can't help but laugh a little and kiss her back, because oh sweet Death it's been years. Every curve of her body is just as he remembers. She still yelps when he nips her neck, still shudders when he trails kisses down her torso, across her stomach and between her legs. Her skin is smooth and white and twenty-nine years old and so perfect, so lovely. He plays her like his piano and she squirms beneath his fingers. And she knows his body too, inside and out, and he gasps and groans to her ministrations.

She was fierce, Maka. More often than not she'd take charge, and it was only every so often that Soul got to be the one on top. But now he can't help but notice: her fierceness is gone.

After, they lay in each other's arms, twined together. He kisses the top of her head and she hums contentedly.

She's Maka, but she's not. She never was.

"I'm sorry," he tells her, but she's already asleep.

-x-

The birds are singing. He opens his eyes.

Sunlight streams into the bedroom through the thin curtains, igniting the dust motes that dance around each other, slowly, languidly, like so many little solar systems. Through the walls of the apartment he can hear automobiles making their way down the street, there and gone again. For a long time he simply lays there, listening to birds and cars and quiet, to the steady hum of life in Death City just outside his room.

She's gone.

He knows because he can't hear her slow, sleeping breaths beside his. He knows because the space where her soul used to be is cold and dark and empty once more. Sadness trickles in, slow and deep and familiar, an ache in his heart for what could have been, for _her _beside him, familiar and warm and comforting.

_Why? _he wants to ask, but he knows the answer.

Last night, they resonated, and he saw inside her soul. It was full of light, full of music, so radiant, so beautiful, so fragile. In those moments he knew, knew that she would have to go soon, that that music in her soul would call her back to wherever she came from and he and Anna would be without her once more. And he had clung to her, her warmth, her life, as if somehow he could keep her here on this earth with him and she wouldn't slip through his fingers a second time.

He'd known it couldn't last.

It hits him all over again, the loss of her. A tidal wave of memories: her bottomless green eyes, her smile, those twin pigtails that she stubbornly insisted on wearing, the way she would kiss him when he hugged her from behind when it was her night to wash the dishes, the books she left lying around _everywhere_, her adorable frown, even the pain of being hit over the head with a hardcover…

_Maka_.

He concentrates fiercely on his breathing. In. And out. He feels his heart strain against his ribs.

Is it possible for wounds like this to ever heal?

Soul thinks not.


	6. admit it

**A/N: **_day six, prompt "bandages."_

* * *

They did it for the Vine.

It was late and they were a little high and the magic stinging his fingers was just _begging _for release. Black*Star felt it too; his blue hair was smoking. Somehow they'd thought it would be a good idea to try some of the spells in the book Black*Star had filched from Professor Stein's collection ("That wimpy magic is no match for the mighty Black*Star!").

"Stupid," Maka says as she winds the bandage slowly and carefully around his right hand. Even so, Soul can't hold back a yelp. "I thought elves were supposed to be _nice_."

Maka rolls her eyes. "Only if you don't piss us off."

"It was actually pretty cool, though," he says, grinning. Maka shoots him a look. "You two didn't actually _post _that, did you?"

"Hell yeah we did."

She shakes her head. "_Mages_," she mutters under her breath.

"It was pretty popular, too. Admit it, pigtails. It was the most spectacular fireworks display you've ever fucking seen in your life."

"Never do it again," she says, but there's a little smile on her face just the same.


	7. on the roof

**A/N: **_and so, SoMa week has drawn to a close. I must say, it was quite enjoyable. :) and now, i present to you day 7, prompt "first i love you." enjoy._

* * *

On the roof, it's quiet. She lies on her back and stares up at the stars, trying very, very hard not to drown in the glittering black abyss of the sky.

"_Soul?"_

"_Mmm?"_

"_What division do you want to join?"_

"_I'm thinking the military police."_

"_Why?"_

"_Who wants to know?"_

"_Me, stupid. Who else?"_

_He sighs. "Why do people usually join the military police, Maka?"_

It's cold. She wishes she brought a blanket, or perhaps her cloak.

_He held her in his arms while she cried, because her good-for-nothing papa was killed and it was all her fault._

_He carried her on his back because her ankle was twisted and she couldn't move, even though there were titans closing in._

_He literally snatched her from the jaws of death, because her body was about to break from the effort of keeping that titan's mouth open._

_He risked his life for her more times than she could count._

On the roof, though, she's never been cold.

"_I want to join the Survey Corps."_

"_You have a death wish or something?"_

_She glares. "No."_

_He raises one eyebrow. "Seems like it."_

"_I want to go outside," she tells him._

"_There's nothing but titans out there."_

"_Not true. My mother…before she died, she used to tell me stories. About what's beyond the walls. There's landscapes made of nothing but ice and vast plains of sand and a place called the ocean that's so big it swallows the world. Look, she even gave me a book!"_

_He flips through the pages._

"_Free," she murmurs. "No walls. Think about it, Soul."_

Think about it, Soul.

_They're on the roof, under the stars, like always._

"_I'm going to join the Scouting Legion," he tells her, and she smiles._

Soul.

_The strange, red-eyed boy with sharp teeth and shaggy white hair._

"_Bookworm," he teased._

"_Weirdo," she shot back._

_His smile was equal parts terrifying and reassuring and made something shiver in her heart. More than anything, she wanted to run her hands through that soft white hair._

_They could talk for hours or not at all in the dead of night, lying side by side on the roof, because neither of them could sleep with their nightmares._

_They spoke of everything and nothing._

_He was her protector. Her partner. Her best friend._

"I love you," she tells him like she planned, casually, like she's remarking on the weather. And for a long, long time he's silent, so long that Maka begins to worry that he's left her, even though she knows he never would, especially after she said something like that. She turns her head and looks at him, except that he's not there, there's just cold stone and dark empty air in the space where he should be.

"I love you so much," she croaks, and then the tears start to flow and she sits and buries her head between her knees because she never told him just how much he meant to her and now he'll never know.


End file.
